Last night I happened to see a myth Busters episode where they were plugging the barrel of a 12 gauge and firing it.They were trying to see if the barrel would peel like a banana like in the Elmer Fudd cartoons. They started out with a fake hand in front of the muzzle goodbye hand, Then they pushed the muzzle 6 inches into the ground, this time they got a slight bulge in the barrel but the ventilated rib peeled right back, the last thing they did was plug the barrel with a round piece of steel about 6 inches long, they also welded this to the barrel. When they fired the gun the plug was blown out of the muzzle, and a small bulge was in the tube, I was really surprised. There was no backblast that would have harmed the shooter. But I wouldn't pull the trigger on something like that. I remember a video that was making the rounds where an elk hunter had his barrel peel back when he fired with an obstruction in the barrel.

As an HS instructor, I look for that kind of stuff. We keep a shotgun barrel at the clube that is split in 5 tears from about two inches behind the muzzle to about 4 inches ahead of the chamber. The owner said it was snow ( I suspect ice) in the muzzle. The barrel is bulged at the splits to around 2 inch diameter. Looks a bit like the old paper Japanese Lantern.

when I was smithing, I had a kid bring me his dad's shotgun, panicked. he'd skipped school, gone rabbit hunting in the snow, clogged the choke area with snow, and blown the barrel open. I cut back the barrel, mounted a bead, stuck the muzzle in the blueing tank for 15 minutes, and it looked ok, but his dad still noticed the diff in look and feel.

FWIW, the NICEST "riot-gun" that I ever had in 30 years of LE was a Browning Auto-Five that was "stuck in the mud" & then fired, rupturing the barrel. - One of our armorers "sawed it off" to about 2" from the end of the forearm & that BEAST stopped many a "potential mess" w/o firing a shot. - "My Guys" called it: THE INTIMIDATOR.

Snow, mud, etc CAN make a shotgun barrel into "a flower", despite MYTHBUSTERS.
(Otoh, SOME weapons cannot be "blown-up", absent C4 or something similar. = COL Whelen TRIED to destroy a 6.5mm Jap rifle without success & even drilled & tapped the barrel & "screwed in" a piece of tool steel into the "threaded barrel" & then fired it with "proof loads", jammimg the action, such that it had to be "beaten open with a mallet" - I'm told that he finally gave up "blowing up" the rifle, as "a waste of time".)

I suspect part of the issue was that they started with a new production shotgun. If they had just trolled the used rack for a sad old beater of a scattergun, that might have gotten the results they were seeking.

Yeah, new barrels are amazingly strong. I saw a video where someone stuffed a 20ga down an 870 barrel and followed it up with a 12ga. I was expecting kaboom, but it just swaged the 20ga shell down and ejected it without even setting it off with no apparent damage to the 870. Pretty wild. A lot more sporty that I’d every want to try.